Coffee Hour

Before delving into Engaging Our Theological Diversity, the latest report from the Unitarian Universalist Association's Commission on Appraisal, I'd like to share a lighting-strike moment after which I've never been able to look at the issue of theological change in quite the same way.

While working at the leaky and sadly dilapidated library at my seminary, I came across a little publication filed away in the forties and promptly forgotten. It was an open letter to Unitarians written by a minister named Edward Ohrenstein. He had been leading Starr King School for the Ministry and the experience was apparently not a good one. Ohrenstein was a Unitarian who believed his religion could only stray so far from its Christian roots and still lay claim to theological and historical continuity. A group of secularists, he warned, was trying to take over Starr King in order to turn out ministers of a "pseudo-religious cult." He believed there was a fight going on over the identity of the Unitarian faith and its relationship to Christianity, and it wasn't being waged so much in our congregations as in our institutional leadership and seminaries.

We felt something like the bewilderment of a couple who neglected until their honeymoon to discuss family planning. The meeting with the internship committee was over. I'd accepted an offer to study at the Smaller Larger UU Church, when someone asked casually if my car was reliable. "Car?" I repeated. "Oh no. I'm a life-long pedestrian!"

If you close your eyes and try to picture George Washington, chances are the image you see was first created by a Unitarian. Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) painted 104 likenesses of the first American President, representing about a tenth of his overall portrait production. That is saying a lot, since Stuart was not only a prolific painter, but he almost exclusively painted portraits. In fact, there are only ten known Stuart paintings that are not portraits.

Stuart painted a number of Unitarians, including a gently smiling Joseph Priestley and a really remarkable elderly John Adams, whom I hope someday to resemble.

Currently, the American National Gallery of Art is offering an exhibition of Stuart's portraits, which runs through the end of July. For those of us too far from the National Mall to convieniently see the exhibition in person, the Gallery has a great online version. After you check that out, you might also like to listen to National Public Radio's story about Stuart's portraits of Washington, which examines why the portraits are distictive and how they reflected the values of the new American democracy.

Thanks to Frank Schulman, whose This Day in Unitarian Universalist History reminded me that Stuart died on this day in 1828.

There have been many times in my life, especially those times when I have found myself consulting a doctor or therapist, when I have ardently wished to be prescribed not a pill or a course of cognitive exercises, but a really good book. I am a great believer in the curative powers of literature. Not for mechanical problems, of course. I wouldn't want a reading cure for a broken leg or manic depression, but there are many areas of medicine and psychology that are not simply a breakdown of the physical structure of the body or a misfiring of synapses and these ills, I believe, are the sort which benefit from a change in perspective, a chance to get outside of one's own head or circumstances, or the introduction of emotions foreign to one's previous experience